Blogs Against Humanity - Adventures in Sympathetic Misanthropy

  The perfect antidote to the tiresome early-aughts teen comedy "So what was all that about enlarged holes and tight cracks?"   These days, GHOST WORLD rarely gets a mention when most people discuss the best cinematic comic-book adaptations of all time. This is something of a crime, because 25 years later, it remains exactly that: a phenomenal adaptation of a highly-regarded comic series.    This is somewhat understandable when you consider the fact that Daniel Clowes' critically-acclaimed 8-issue series doesn't feature superheroes in tights, but rather a pair of sardonic 18 year-old girls who have just graduated High School and who find themselves on increasingly divergent paths in their road to adulthood. The screenplay was written in a collaboration between Clowes, and director Terry Zwigoff, and while the film was a critical success, it didn't make much of an impact at the box office and remains something of a cult film. And coming in on the heels of a decade...

The team is held hostage, but looks bored. I feel ya, ladies. Oh man, if only this flick was as entertaining as its poster and promo images lead you to believe its going to be.  GIRLS WITH BALLS is a French/Belgian sports-themed horror-comedy, directed by Olivier Afonso, that simply manages to lose track of what sort of film it wishes to be, and flounders its way to an unsatisfactory ending. To be honest, I should have known from the start that the tone-deaf vagabond-cowboy-bard narrator with a penchant for spoilers was a bad sign. Unfunny singing-narrator aside, the first act does its job well, and establishes the characters in rip-roaring fashion, via a Volleyball cup-match, and subsequent character-interaction inside the team's RV once the game is won. Schlocky, silly, and sophomoric, it manages to be a lot of goofy fun for the first 15 minutes. When the team gets lost and detoured towards a backwoods hostel populated by inbred, cannibal-hicks, the bad-guys are established, an...